Be ‘Agile’ or Fail: The Top Challenge for HR Teams in 2018

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Keith Johnstone is the Head of Marketing at Peak Sales Recruiting, a leading B2B sales recruiting company launched in 2006. Keith leads all marketing activities and has successfully grown revenue and lead volume every quarter. He plays a key role in driving Peak Sales Recruiting which leads the industry with a success rate 50% higher than the industry average, working with a wide-range of clients including boutique, mid-size and world-class companies including P&G, Gartner, Deloitte, Merck, Taser and others

In today’s business landscape, being agile is critical to success. Too often, companies get bogged down with the process. As we move forward into 2018, Keith Johnstone, Head of Marketing at Peak Sales Recruiting explains why CEO’s are looking at HR leaders to help make the organizations more agile and nimble

We all have that colleague who overuses buzz words such as synergy, deep dive, and low-hanging fruit. Yet, every now and again, a buzz word arises that actually impacts your business.

With questions swirling around whether the economy can sustain its tear, uncertainty has again set in. But for organizations with the ability to quickly adapt to changing business and economic conditions, companywide and HR focused objectives – particularly those focused on driving growth – won’t have to be compromised. Technological advancements, combined with changing attitudes towards ‘process’ heavy human capital initiatives, have produced greater efficiencies and faster results; two performance measurements near the top of HR’s list.

Yet nearly 700 executives reported having little confidence in their companies’ ability to quickly mobilize in response to market shifts. More than 50-percent of those surveyed did not believe that their culture was adaptive enough to respond.

To solve this quandary, CEO’s are turning to HR leaders. They’re giving them the mandate to create a workforce and cultivate a culture that is agile and nimble enough to capitalize on new opportunities and overcome deep-rooted organizational challenges.

Having worked closely with HR leaders and based on their collective experiences and the latest studies, we have compiled three ways human resource and talent acquisition teams can harness the power of agility to drive organizational performance in 2018.

Here are 3 ways human resource teams can become more agile in 2018:

1.Learn from Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: In the popular movie franchise, Cruise leads IMF, a self-managed team that operates outside of government bureaucracy to save the U.S. from evil. In the real world, many leading companies such as Microsoft, Spotify, and Airbnb have employed similar strategies. For example, ‘Scaling Agile @ Spotify’ formed cross-departmental teams that functioned like a startup with Spotify as the incubator. The teams – ‘Tribes’ and ‘Guilds’ – had delegated decision-making autonomy on key service and product development initiatives. Their work has been so impactful that they’ve helped the company keep giants like Apple from stealing market share in a growth segment. And while the cross-functional, collaboration first approach has been a key pillar for the company’s success, the real reason why these smaller teams are necessary - paralysis.

Bain research studied 300 large corporations worldwide and found that the top quartile’s key to success was that they spent 50% less time on unnecessary and ineffective collaboration. That is why small, talented teams that work outside of traditional hierarchical management systems can solve mission-critical issues, faster. To be more agile in 2018, HR departments must work closely with C-Suite executives on empowering middle and front-line leaders to build nimble, cross-functional teams.

2. Transform internally at scale: A Korn Ferry Institute study found that increasing investment in-aligning HR practices with business objectives resulted in a 7.5% decrease in employee turnover and, on a per employee basis, $27,044 more in sales, $18,641 more in market value, and $3,814 more in profit. Butin tech, HR departments have traditionally struggled to be aligned with rapid go-to-market plays and shorter product development cycles. Workforce policy development, talent acquisition tactics, and competency and performance review initiatives weren’t in sync with the changing pace of business. Using agility as its foundation, one company approached the problem differently.

McKinsey recently released a case study called ING’s Agile Transformation. Recognizing the importance of agility at scale, ING made 3,500 employees re-interview for their jobs. Remarkably, 40% of them ended up in new positions within the company or were let go. What’s particularly interesting about the findings is that in many cases, the change was not because of an employee’s skill set. It was a mindset that could embrace the constant state of change that financial service and fin-tech organizations need to remain competitive. ING’s HR department led an unprecedented overhaul of their organization and this experience can be replicated across organizations in 2018.

3. Hire the change agents with versatile skill sets: The phrase, “We have always done it this way,” is the kryptonite to success. Economic volatility and advances in technology, in certain cases, render last year’s business plan obsolete. While it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel every time, HR departments must evolve their competency models to hire people possessing ‘change agent’ traits and experiences. Steve Jobs famously said if you want to hire change agents to hire pirates. He wanted employees that would challenge the status quo, were flexible, diverse, passionate and results-oriented. If HR departments do not bring in fresh people and ideas, the company will fail to change for the better in 2018.